‘We’ll get a cab and fight our way through this gridlock. Bill will meet us there and by the time we arrive the chopper should be ready.’
Chapter 48
Hancock Field Air National Guard Base, Syracuse, Onondaga County, New York State, United States of America
‘Is there somewhere you need to be, Sammy?’ Nagell asked, glancing behind him at the training officer, who was pacing about behind the control position. ‘You keep looking at your watch.’
Major Dawood shook his head. ‘Just wondering how much longer you’re going to take with this fairly simple exercise,’ he replied.
‘As long as it takes, Sammy. You know I always do a good job.’
In fact, Sami Dawood was keeping a very close eye on the time, but also on the progress of the exercise, which he did as a matter of routine for every training mission that he planned and supervised.
But on that day he was working to a rather different deadline, one that he knew would explosively mark the end of his military career in America, as well as end the lives of an extraordinarily large number of citizens in Washington D.C.
And what he was waiting for right then was a call or maybe a text message from the Iraqi freedom fighter he knew only as Abū Tadmir. A message that would tell him the final preparation, the final link, was now in place and that he could move on to his own personal endgame. What he would do then would ensure that his name would be revered throughout Islamic history as one of the greatest shahids of all time.
Chapter 49
South Capitol Street Heliport, Washington D.C., and Bel Air, Harford County, Maryland, United States of America
The drive to the heliport, which on a normal day and in normal traffic conditions would have taken about ten minutes, maybe even less depending on how you caught the traffic lights, took them almost half an hour. The taxi Rogers had hailed on the street got jammed almost as soon as they moved off, and after remaining stationary for about five minutes, the two men got out and walked.
Then Morgan spotted a police car with an officer at the wheel, half on and half off the pavement at the end of D Street, and they jogged over to it. Rogers produced his FBI credentials and a few seconds later they were on the move, the driver clearing a path with its lights and siren. Even so, they had to double back a couple of times and take to the side roads to avoid streets that were completely jammed with stationary vehicles.
And all the way Morgan fretted that they were losing too much time as the unknown and unknowable deadline drew invisibly closer. He wondered if the blackouts and the inevitable chaos that had followed as the traffic lights stopped working had been specifically intended to frustrate the movement of law enforcement personnel trying to locate and arrest Sadir. But realistically, he knew that there had to be much more to the blackouts than that.
As the police car pulled up on the street outside the heliport, the growl of its siren dying away to a whimper, a black painted helicopter dropped out of the sky and settled onto one of the parking spots, its metal skids separating slightly as the weight came off the rotor.
‘That’s our ride,’ Rogers said. He thanked the police officer for getting them to the heliport about as fast as anybody could have done in the circumstances, and then they strode quickly to the entrance.
Inside, William Clark was already waiting for them, holding what looked like a sports bag but which he opened to reveal a couple of Iridium satellite phones, two Glock 23s in .40 S&W calibre with belt holsters and an unopened box of .40 cal ammunition. Although the 9mm Glock 17 and 19 are extremely popular personal weapons in America, the FBI and many American police forces have opted for the heavier calibre Glock 23 because the .40 calibre S&W ammunition offers much better stopping power than the smaller round. No law enforcement officer ever wants to shoot a suspect, but every law enforcement officer also wants to be certain that if he does have to fire, the person he’s shooting at will be taking no further part in the proceedings after being hit. The 9mm round simply does not possess sufficient kinetic energy to always ensure that this will happen.
Rogers glanced in the bag and nodded. ‘Good thinking. I’m a big fan of redundancy, and you can never have too many guns.’
Clark had grabbed a Bureau car and caught a break with the traffic, getting down as far as the junction of 4th Street with M Street in the Southwest Waterfront district before he reached the end of another jam, and even then the lights and siren fitted to the FBI Suburban meant that he had been able to keep moving, albeit slowly.
As soon as the pilot of the Bell 407 gave the appropriate signal to the ground marshaller, the three men ducked involuntarily under the rotor disc, as everybody approaching a running helicopter always does, and then climbed into the back of the THU chopper. They sat down, strapped in and pulled on headsets so they could hear each other above the roar of the Allison turboshaft.
The Tactical Helicopter Unit is the FBI’s elite rotary wing division, attached to the equally elite HRT, the Hostage Rescue Team, and employs some of the most highly skilled helicopter pilots in the world, trained to fly in all weathers, in all conditions, and in all possible locations including tight spots that most regular chopper pilots wouldn’t even consider landing in. The hop from the heliport to Bel Air was hardly going to be the most taxing flight that particular pilot had ever made.
‘No news yet from Woodstock or Harrisonburg,’ William Clark said to Grant Rogers.
‘But the local police are mobile, yes?’ Rogers asked.
‘Yes. I think the biggest problem is that while, thanks to Mr Morgan here, we’ve had triangulation of their locations, that only indicates the buildings they were in, not the actual apartments, and checking the map it looks to me as if they probably are in apartment buildings. It’ll just take time to look at everyone in each block and haul out the suspects. And from what you said, they might already have headed for the hills, so we may already be too late.’
‘We might still get them,’ Rogers replied, ‘even if they have already run. We have their names – maybe their real names but more likely aliases – and we have their pictures. We can stick them on the website in the Most Wanted Fugitives rogues’ gallery and wait for some citizen to spot them. And because of what’s happening in DC, we can probably put them right at the top of the top ten and add a juicy price tag to each one. That’s something else that seems to work.’
The Bell lifted off as soon as the pilot had checked that his three passengers were properly strapped in, and Morgan was treated to a view of Washington D.C. that he’d never seen before as the helicopter flew north-east in the general direction of Baltimore, more or less following the course of the Anacostia River. The most obvious landmark was the Washington Monument and behind that the unmistakable shape of the White House and, closer and further to the east, the Capitol Building. What surprised him was the number of green and open spaces there were once they’d cleared the centre of DC. It seemed to only take a few minutes before they were over more or less open countryside.
‘That’s where your girlfriend’s working,’ Rogers said, pointing out of the right-hand side window of the Bell at a brutal lump of a building entirely surrounded by acres of car parking, most spaces apparently occupied.
‘No Such Agency,’ Clark confirmed. ‘Famous for never telling anybody anything, even if you ask them really nicely. I’m really surprised that they let an Englishwoman in there, allowed her to cross the hallowed portal.’
Morgan nodded. ‘She works at GCHQ out at Cheltenham, back in England, and a lot of the stuff she does – which she also won’t tell me about, by the way – means tapping into the NSA’s databanks pretty much on a daily basis. So I suppose you could argue she’s kind of an honorary NSA employee, just with a different accent and a different colour passport. And she’s not my girlfriend, only a colleague.’
‘Whatever you say, Ben, whatever you say.’
The Bell continued heading north-east, the pilot maintaining a track that would take it to the north-west of
the sprawling urbanisation of Baltimore and also keep them well clear, both laterally and vertically, of the traffic patterns at the busy Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, commonly known as BWI, which was rather less of a mouthful. Once the helicopter had passed abeam of the Liberty Reservoir, the pilot altered course to an easterly heading to track almost directly towards Bel Air.
The FBI resident agency in the town was a low, two- and three-storey brown brick building located at 2107 Laurel Bush Road, opposite a warehouse selling building supplies and in an area marked by industrial units of one sort or another. There was limited parking outside the building for cars and no spaces at all for helicopters, but that wasn’t a problem. A short distance to the west was a U-shaped development of businesses and retail units and in the centre of the U was a large car park, the centre of which had been cleared of vehicles and fenced off to allow space for the Bell to touch down.
‘Takes all the fun out of it when they make it so easy,’ the pilot – he’d introduced himself as ‘Richard Muldoon, and you can call me Rich but not Dick’ – muttered as he flared the helicopter and brought it in for a gentle landing on the tarmac surface. ‘I’m sticking around in case you need top cover for this op,’ he added as he started shutting down the aircraft, ‘and when you’ve blown away the bad guys or whatever the hell it is you’re doing out here in the sticks, I can give you a ride back to DC if you want.’
‘We might just take you up on that,’ Rogers said, ‘but we’ll definitely need you in the air, or at least ready to take off, once we hit the target.’
‘Which is where? Presumably not here in Bel Air?’
‘No. It’s near a place called Fairview, which is four or five miles north-west of here. A couple minutes in the air if you’re already turning and burning.’
‘Yeah. No sweat. I’ll stay here with the chopper. Don’t want some country boy getting inside and trying to hot-wire it.’
Waiting outside the cordoned off area which was marked by linked steel barriers were two men, both looking fit and well built, around six feet tall and wearing dark suits, white shirts and dark ties. One of them even had on a pair of sunglasses, making both of them look like the archetypal Men in Black, but these two weren’t looking for aliens. Or at least, not aliens from another planet.
‘ASAC Rogers?’ the one without sunglasses asked, extending his hand.
‘That’s me,’ Rogers replied, shaking his hand, and quickly made the introductions. ‘This is Senior Special Agent William Clark and the third member of our group is Ben Morgan, who’s on secondment to the Bureau for just this one operation.’
That was close enough to the truth, Morgan hoped, to avoid too many awkward questions being asked.
‘Understood. I’m Special Agent John Baker and this is Special Agent David Crawford, both of us out of the Baltimore Field Office. Our SAC is here as well, and he’s waiting for you at the resident agency. Our SWAT team is already in the area and on its way to Fairview. But everybody involved has a whole bunch of questions and they’d really like some answers.’
‘I’ll bet they have.’
Despite the distance from the car park to the resident agency only being perhaps two hundred yards, the two special agents had arrived by car. In fact, they’d arrived in two cars, if two black Chevrolet Suburbans could actually be classed as cars. To Morgan’s English eyes, used to the much more compact vehicles found in the UK and Europe, they looked vast, more like small coaches than cars.
‘We weren’t sure how many of you there’d be,’ Baker said in partial explanation as he steered the Suburban down the street, ‘or if you’d have a bunch of equipment with you.’
Inside the resident agency a heavily built black man wearing an impeccable light grey suit, white shirt, silver tie and an almost palpable air of authority was waiting when Special Agent Crawford led the way through the door.
‘Rogers?’ he asked, staring at the new arrivals.
Grant Rogers nodded and stepped towards him.
‘Follow me. Now.’ And with that the man turned away and strode down a short corridor to an open door, Rogers trailing a few feet behind him. Inside, the man sat down in a large leather swivel chair behind a mahogany desk and stared across it towards Rogers.
‘I’m the Baltimore SAC, Lewis Gordon,’ he said, ‘and I’m here at this resident agency because I want to know what the hell’s going on. I’ve just spent a very unpleasant five minutes on the phone listening to your SAC, Charles Bouchier, tell me exactly why he wants you to be suspended and some guy called Ben Morgan, who I presume you brought with you, to be arrested immediately. The last thing I want or need is some guy from the Hoover building I’ve never heard of telling me to prep my SWAT team, to clear a space for a helicopter to land right here in Bel Air, and to make plans for carrying out an assault without authorisation or justification or even giving me the faintest fucking clue who’s going to be assaulted, where they are or why they’ve suddenly become a target.
‘So if you don’t want an awesome shower of shit to descend upon your head from a hell of a height, Rogers, then I suggest you start talking and give me one good reason why I shouldn’t do what Bouchier wants, right now.’
Chapter 50
Hancock Field Air National Guard Base, Syracuse, Onondaga County, New York State, United States of America
Sami Dawood’s attention was divided between three different things: the Reaper’s training flight, which he had devised and was personally supervising; his wristwatch, where the minute hand seemed to be rotating around the dial at ever-increasing speed; and his mobile phone, which was remaining ominously silent.
Of those three things, it was the seemingly far more rapid than usual passage of time allied to the absence of any contact from the person he was expecting to hear from that was causing him the most mental distress and anguish. At this, almost literally the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour, after months and years of planning, surely they could not fail. Surely Allah would not permit it.
What should he do if the call didn’t come? If there was no contact? If that nightmare became a reality? He had come so far in his personal and spiritual development, thanks to the imam who had recognised and acknowledged his anguish and inner turmoil as a senior member of the selfsame military machine that had been slaughtering hundreds and thousands of his brother Muslims in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, delivering death by remote control using their fighter and bomber aircraft and their infernal, devilish drones, invisible, inaudible and impersonal killing machines.
When he had first contacted the imam, he had been seeking guidance, an explanation, not absolution or anything of that sort. His dilemma was as obvious as it was apparently irreconcilable: how could he remain a devout and practising Muslim if the job he was doing involved training people in the safest, easiest and most efficient and cost-effective methods of going out there and killing Muslims on behalf of the United States of America?
Praying hadn’t helped, and nor had the conflicting voices in his head. He was trying to do the impossible, to balance the exhortations of Allah, the acknowledged reality that all Muslims on every continent were brothers and brothers didn’t kill brothers because family, whether local or global, was sacrosanct, with the comradeship and professionalism of the American military, the organisation that he had pledged allegiance to, just as he had pledged allegiance to America itself. How could he reconcile that, and how could he accept and cope with the knowledge that his country of birth was now at war with radical Islam and, at least by implication, with the whole of the Muslim world?
Until he had talked with the imam, he had almost felt as if his very soul was being torn apart. But eventually his prayers and the imam’s guidance had shown him where his true destiny lay: he was first, last and always, a Muslim, and the conduct of the West, and particularly of the Americans in the Middle East, had shown beyond all doubt that they were godless polluters of the planet, a radicalised Christian nation that would not res
t until every other religion had been crushed beneath their steel-shod feet. And the imam had shown him that he was in a unique position, a Muslim able to help redress the balance, to even the scores, and able to do it from the inside, from the very bowels of the American war machine.
When he had grasped that essential – and in retrospect, entirely obvious – truth Dawood had managed to quiet his inner demons and was able to worship Allah with a clear conscience, while at the same time carrying out his military duties with his usual quiet professionalism while he waited for further guidance. And that guidance had been provided sooner than he had expected.
He had been contacted by a man who had understood his inner conflict, sympathised with his dilemma, and had finally been able to show him the way forward, to specify the precise route that he would have to take to retain his Islamic purity and at the same time help to strike a blow for Muslims everywhere. A route that would also, as a shahid, ensure his eternal life in the beatific presence of Allah himself.
That man had called himself Abū Tadmir, and Dawood neither knew nor cared what his real name was, only that his wisdom and certainty of purpose served to further quell his doubts and reinforce the path that he knew in his heart was the correct one to follow.
And now, when the retaliatory strike against America’s capital city was about to begin, the contact, the instruction, that he had been waiting for simply hadn’t arrived. He could only assume, and hope, that Abū Tadmir had encountered some kind of technical difficulty that was hampering the changeover. At least, that was what he was silently praying was the reason.
‘Surveillance run complete,’ Nagell reported. ‘The Reaper’s in the climb for the transit to Fort Drum. We’ll need briefing on targets and weapons pretty soon, Sammy.’
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